For many illumination applications such as an LED (light emitting diode) illumination application, color change can be achieved by using various color LED elements that emit light of a particular color. Typically, three primary color LED elements are used to generate a desired color image. The three primary colors are red, green and blue (RGB). Thus, red, green and blue LED elements are used to generate the desired color image. In some applications, other primary color LEDs such as yellow, cyan and magenta LED elements are also used in addition to RGB to produce fuller and brighter color images.
Many LED illumination applications such as projection displays require an illumination system with a high level of brightness in a small effective emitting area. This high level of brightness can be accomplished conventionally by adding more light sources. However, these conventional methods can be both technologically impossible if there is a limited space for integrating light sources and economically impractical as it can be very expensive to integrate and use multiple light sources. An alternate method of increasing the brightness is to use larger lenses to try to collect as much light as possible. This can also be very impractical as larger accurate lenses can be quite expensive to manufacture and integrate into an illumination system.
Therefore, it would be desirable to provide an illumination system and method of increasing the light output in a simple and economical manner for a given light source.